Life, Now

Finally, more than one full year after my retirement, I am beginning to feel like I am becoming the person I was always supposed to be.  For the curious, that would be pioneer-hunter-gatherer-survivalist.  Who would ever have predicted this?  I understand that there is often regression as part and parcel of the aging process.  Often we become less capable in skills we had once mastered, less interested in the new and exciting developments brought to us via modern business, less adventurous in the wilderness. We may even eventually return to very early childhood-like behaviors.... eating soft foods, needing reminders to zip, and even (shudder) returning to diapers and sides on the bed again. No, no... I am not yet even close to these final stages and really hope to simply pop off one day before I have to ask someone to turn me over in bed because I can no longer do that. Actually, I can think of good reasons to ask someone  to turn me over in bed but disability is not one of them. I digress.  I feel kind of reborn, if you will, into a new time, a simpler time, but one filled with lots of hard work not typically done by your average middle-age ex-teacher person.  We have lived a fairly conventional life made up of regular jobs and paychecks, kids involved in school and sports and on to college, their own marriages and lives, and plenty of grocery shopping using the family van. We now have the empty nest and I quit... I am essentially now a kept woman, as the hubby toils away still, bringing home the real bacon. Someday, he will also discover the joys of retirement, but not yet.  I would invoke the Italian phrase "dolce far niente", translated as "so sweet to do nothing"... but that is not exactly accurate either.  I ask your indulgence as I employ that old saw "we are human beings, not human doings" The "doing"  vs "being" distinction is important.  I am certainly not ready to be nothing and I am certainly not doing nothing.  I simply do not know the Italian words  for "so sweet to be what I want to be when I want to do whatever or be some way or another".

Our habitat of choice is fairly isolated, not far from people but home is not a peopled place. We are connected to the world via satellite and internet, telephone and automobile. Now, I find days go by without using the car. I stick around here. I have not given up the electronic connections but can actually imagine not having the television and internet.  We have been without both of those for most of early life and many of our adult years. The TV would not be missed. The computer seems to have replaced human contact with email and facebook contact, though it is useful for making party invitations. It has supplanted cookbooks, newspapers, gossip magazines, real letters and cards, phone conversations, books and travel agents. I hear they are working on replacing teachers in public schools with internet learning, and we know it is used for higher education, if you call an online program an education. Here again rises my outraged atavistic perspective, that real learning comes from relationships and common experiences, not from a list of facts and reading recommendations. But I suspect I will lose this battle.  Not the first nor the last. How much of this should I keep to myself? I am sure I will eventually be proven correct...


I am still evolving and the world is evolving. We are just following different spirals, sometimes almost touching but generally on our own inevitable tracks.  I wonder if my pioneer-hunter-gatherer-survivalist persona will become more apparent or necessary with time. Today my big decisions are should I make apple sauce or apple butter out of the 20 pounds of drops I picked up today?  Or maybe just dehydrate them until a better idea comes along? The sauerkraut is fermented and canned... should I start a new batch or make coleslaw and cabbage soup? Should I gather the cabbage in the garden all in before the woodchuck finds it? Will this or that field be better for a couple of sheep?  I sometimes have to work to keep my thoughts from considering post-apocalyptic scenarios, where the survivalist piece might be useful. Not World War Z but there are plenty of weirdos out there and lots of heavy weaponry. I mostly like where I find myself these days, working on things that seem almost ready to disappear from modern knowledge and experience. Vermont is a great place to be this way.. a place where good husbandry, good food, simple pleasures, caring communities and a vibrant history and culture are valued and practiced.  Maybe I just have to evolve a bit more into this life as it is, now that I have shed the shackles of the workaday world. Here, the only deadlines are the ones I set for myself...

Time Travelling

Here is another piece for our writing group...

Time Travelling to 1935.

I have taken myself back to 1935, to Iron Mountain in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where my father’s parents live on a small farm at Pine Creek. It is summertime, which is the best time to travel in the northern regions, a warm and fruitful time.  1935 tells me the Great Depression is upon us but it is not raging in the farming communities in this place. I want to meet and visit with my grandmother, whom I never met. I am told I am very much like her. I have a picture in my house of the family, taken probably about 1925  or so. My dad, born in 1919, is about 6 in the photo.  The youngest child, my uncle Walter, is a baby, no more than a year old, as he would be in 1925.  Grandma is a solid, sober looking woman, 45 years old, mother of 8 living children, all born within the span of 12 years. My dad looks like her, I look like my dad, so the physical evidence is there.  She immigrated from Swedish speaking Finland in 1908. She arrived with a Russian passport, thanks to geopolitical realities, but has always been identified as Swedish, so that is what we say now.

Before 1933, the family lived in town. Grandpa was a shoemaker and had a shop that the US government took to build a post office in Iron Mountain. Grandma had grown up on a farm, the child of crofters on a large place, and she wanted to go back to farming. The other side of the coin is that she insisted that the family move out of town to remove Grandpa from the earthly temptations of drinking and womanizing, but there is no proof of the second sin. They were married 11/11/11, and Grandma is quoted as saying, while 11/11 might be remembered as Armistice Day, for her that was when the war began. Though not prosperous, they lived a self-sufficient rural life on the farm until Grandma died in 1945.

We are in Grandma’s kitchen. It is mid morning. Everyday is baking day, she says, as bread is rising and pies are in the oven. I help by chopping dried apples for coffee cake. It is hot work in July, as the stove needs wood and the kitchen heats up. Kids are doing chores, off with mates, or making plans to attend dances in town. She has already tended the garden and ripe tomatoes and cukes sit in a basket, ready to round out the lunch of sandwiches, pickled beets, and milk. Coffee is on the stove and a fresh pot will be brewed when her neighbor ladies come for “fika”, the afternoon coffee break with cake and smokes in the kitchen. Grandma tells me that they will make plans for their annual weaving days. She will go to her sister Lisa’s house, taking with her the worn clothes and rags collected in the past year, and they will have a little vacation, weaving rag rugs. She says the kids get a kick out of trying to identify their old clothes in the rugs that are scattered through the house. The house is old but has indoor plumbing, a toilet in a closet and a tub. There is a furnace with one vent upstairs in the hallway between the bedrooms. There, the kids leap out of bed and dress over the vent in winter. Grandma tells me that she is glad she moved to America. In Finland, life was hard, work was endless and there was little expectation of better. She only went to 4 years of school and her father and six siblings all moved to America. Only her mother stayed there. Grandma said her father left Finland for America in 1884, when she was just 4, and they never heard from him again.  She tries to explain some of the relations but they are pieces of a complex and incomplete puzzle to me. They all have the same name but it is more of a place name than a family name. She shares some family stories.. both sides, grandpa’s and hers, have their share of members arrested for drunkenness or breaking the Sabbath, births out of wedlock, even thievery, but also the stories of immigration and starting a life in a new place.  Interesting to me but Grandma has apparently moved on from her past.. there is no time for sentimentality with a large family on a farm during the depression. So the stories are brief, the sun is warm, lunch is ready,  and her friends will arrive for coffee. Corn from the fields has been picked for supper.  There is a lull as lunchtime approaches. I must go. She will die in 1945 and I will be born in 1948, so we never meet. I like to think that I have her country soul, transferred to me via some kind of genetic/cosmic magic. I do have her face, her solid body, and a firstborn child at age 32. I am hoping I have more than the 65 years she was allotted.